" The Revolution and individual rights:

That the Revolution, however fine its language, worked for Power and not for liberty as strikingly proved by what happened to individual rights in the course of the upheaval which started in 1789. Never was more striking – or, no doubt more sincere - proclamation made of the intention to recognize that man, as man, had certain sacred rights. That was a great conception of the members of the Constituent Assembly; that is their title to fame. And in like manner the members of the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, and the Thermidorians, all alike, even Bonaparte himself, claimed to have dedicated and guaranteed these rights. And yet the Revolution, obeying the stirrings less of the ideas which it proclaimed than of the unseen principle of life which gave in motion, wiped out all the rights which it had claimed to exalt, and effectively disarmed the citizen of every sure guarantee against the Power to which it had bequeathed an unlimited authority. "

― Bertrand De Jouvenel , On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth